Ella Watson

Ella Watson was a cleaner in a federal office building in Washington and is the woman in American Gothic, the best-known photograph Gordon Parks ever made. She was born in Virginia, and by 1942 was supporting an adopted daughter and three grandchildren on a government charwoman's wage - less than a white cleaner doing identical work. Parks had just been hired by Roy Stryker at the FSA, and had spent his first day in the city being refused service at a department store, a cinema and a restaurant. Stryker told him to talk to the people who cleaned the building. Watson told him about her life, and he posed her with a broom and a mop in front of an American flag, which is a deliberate quotation of Grant Wood's painting and an unmistakable accusation. Stryker's reaction was that Parks had got the whole agency fired, and the picture was not published at the time. What matters and is usually left out is that Parks did not stop there: he photographed Watson, her family, her apartment and her church over the following weeks, some ninety frames, and that series is the reason anything is known about her. She worked as a cleaner until she retired. She died in 1980, aged ninety-seven. The picture was not published until years later and Parks himself said Stryker told him it would get them all fired. It now hangs in the National Gallery of Art. Parks wrote about her in two volumes of memoir. Grant Wood s painting, which the title quotes, shows an Iowa farmer and his daughter with a pitchfork.

• Lived: 1883 CE – 1980 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other